Converting a String to a FileHandle

monkfan has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear revered monks,

Is there a way to do it? Module for it? Suppose I have this large string.


my $string = 'foo bar
              qux woo
              etc etc';
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I would like to convert that string as if it is stored inside a file, and bypassing the file creation step.


my $filehandle = do_sth_to_convert($string);
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Such that I can straight away do things like:

 
while (<$file_handle>) {
   print;
}
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Regards,
Edward

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Re: Converting a String to a FileHandle by japhy (Canon) on May 22, 2006 at 03:00 UTC
Perl 5.8 can do this with open(): `open my $fh, "<", \$string or die "can't read from \$string: $!"; while (<$fh>) { ... }` [download] You're opening a reference to a scalar to read from. Jeff `japhy` Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and `perl` hacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Converting a String to a FileHandle by GrandFather (Saint) on May 22, 2006 at 02:48 UTC
See IO::String. `use warnings; use strict; use IO::String; my $io = IO::String->new ("This is some text\nto be processed as\na fi +le"); print while <$io>;` [download] Prints: `This is some text to be processed as a file` [download] DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Converting a String to a FileHandle by bobf (Monsignor) on May 22, 2006 at 03:16 UTC
Here is an example from the docs for IO::Scalar: `### Open a handle on a string, read it line-by-line, then close it +: $SH = new IO::Scalar \$data; while (defined($_ = $SH->getline)) { print "Got line: $_"; } $SH->close;` [download] I know you were looking for an approach that uses or acts like a filehandle, but here is something that uses split instead: `use warnings; use strict; my $string = "This is some text\nto be processed as\na file"; # use a zero-width positive look-behind assertion to split # the string on whatever is used as the input record # separator ($/) without consuming it foreach my $line ( split( m[(?<=$/)], $string ) ) { print $line; } # or, if you prefer the one-liner look print for split ( m[(?<=$/)], $string );` [download] Update: Added the alternate form of the for/split loop.	[reply] [d/l] [select]